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12 September 2016

Law and Medicine

But can you pitch upon any greater mark of an ill and base education in a city than that there should be need of physicians and supreme magistrates, and that not only for the contemptible and low handicrafts, but for those who boast of having been educated in a liberal manner? Or doth it not appear to be base, and a great sign of want of education, to be obliged to observe justice pronounced on us by others, as our masters and judges, and to have no sense of it in ourselves?

Of all things, this, reply'd he, is the most base.

And do you not, said I, deem this to be more base still, when one not only spends a great part of life in courts of justice, as defendant and plaintiff, but from his ignorance of the beautiful imagines that he becomes renowned for this very thing, as being dextrous in doing injustice, and able to turn himself through all sorts of windings, and using every sort of subterfuge, thinks to get off, so as to evade justice, and all this for the sake of small and contemptible things, being ignorant how much better and more handsome it were so to regulate his life as not to stand in need of a sleepy judge?

This, reply'd he, is still more base than the other.

And to stand in need of the medicinal art, said I, not on account of wounds, or some epidemical distempers incident, but through sloth and such a diet as we mentioned, filled with rheums and wind, like lakes, obliging the skilful sons of Esculapius to invent new names to diseases, such as dropsies and catarrhs — do not you think this abominable?